Prof. Peter Mombaerts is the director of the Department of Molecular Neurogenetics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt, and works on the neurobiology of smell in mice. Among his research interests his main challenge is to answer the question of how each olfactory sensory neuron in the mouse manages to express just one gene from the repertoire of these 1,200 genes. In particular, the mechanisms that regulate the probability of OR gene choice are not well understood.
